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The New Barnum

The Latin proverb audentes Fortuna iuvat is usually translated into English as “Fortune favors the bold.” It has been used by a variety a martial organizations in the West over the centuries. For example, it appears on the regimental insignia of the 3rd Marine Regiment. The British SAS uses “who dares wins” as their motto. The American idiom, “he who hesitates is lost”, is a mistranslation of Cato, but again, the appeal is obvious so it’s easy to see why it has become common.

The point being is that acting boldly has always been seen as a benefit. We associate it with the successful. It’s why mothers tell their sons to stand up straight. It’s why fathers teach their sons to have a firm handshake. The confident guy, who bounds into a room and takes charge will get little push back, because people naturally pick up on his confidence. Boldness is an essential element of leadership. Men will follow a leader who is confident, even if they have their private doubts about the plan.

Boldness is also a good way to rob people.

Victor Lustig was a confidence man living in Paris after the Great War. He read in the newspaper that the city was having trouble maintaining the Eiffel Tower. Lustig came up with an outlandish scheme where he would use that story to sell the Eiffel Tower for scrap iron. He forged some documents and cooked up an elaborate story about how he had been tasked to secretly find some buyers. He found some interested parties, had them picked up in limousines for a tour of the Tower and then convinced one of them, Andre Poisson, to make a bid.

That sounds quite ballsy, but he went further. Poisson’s wife suspected that Lustig may not have been on the level. Lustig decided to use this to his advantage so he met with the couple and confessed that he was actually a government employee, not an agent hired by the city. He made it clear that he was not paid well and was hoping to improve on that by finding the right buyer. In other words, he wanted a bribe. This sealed the deal and Andre Poisson, not only bought the Eiffel Tower, he paid Lustig a bribe to do it.

Every time I see a story about Elon Musk, I think of Victor Lustig. The reason for that is Musk often turns up in the news attached to some bold new scheme to do something most people see as futuristic or massively complicated. He’s sort of a Phileas Fogg, that is always announcing some grand new adventure. The publicity stunts have no real bearing on his alleged project, but he puts a lot of effort into getting public notice for them. There is a P.T. Barnum quality to it that does not quite square with the official story.

The tunneling under Los Angeles story is a good example. There’s nothing new about this idea. The Crossrail is a giant rail tunnel under the city of London that was done using boring machines. It is a 26-mile tunnel that was threaded between the exiting tunnels under the city. There was a recent documentary on it, which is probably where Musk got the idea. The London tunnel is an amazing bit of engineering because there’s a ton of stuff under the city that the tunnelers had to dodge as they dug the thing.

That’s not to say doing such a thing under Los Angeles would be easy, but it is hardly a brilliant futuristic idea. In fact, people have suggested this in the past, but such a project would require tens of billions in tax money. More important, there’s no real reason to do it, other than the fact California is a failed state so building roads and bridges the old way is impossible. Musk is levering that reality to propose his futuristic “solution” for the transport problems of Los Angeles. What a guy!

That’s probably the point of the hype. Tesla, Musk’s one big “successful” scheme is entirely dependent on tax dollars. Take away the subsidies and it goes bust. The same is true of the battery schemes, the solar plant, the space program. According to the LA Times, Musk has netted close to $5 Billion in government money. Not all of it is tax money, of course. A lot of it comes in the form of grants for research and credits for doing government approved projects, like making solar panels. It’s not unreasonable to say the Musk is a tax sink.

There’s also a good chance that like Lustig, Musk works both sides of the street. He gets a bunch of attention for some new project, like digging a tunnel under Los Angeles. He then gets investors lined up, promising tax schemes that will multiply their investment, in addition to getting government support for the project. Since Musk appears to have skin in the game and is wildly confident his plan will work, investors line up. Once it all comes together, Musk is a minority share holder, but in full control of the project.

The formula is to use the media to promote the idea to the public. He then gets some other billionaires to back it on condition that Musk can get the government invested. That is used to pure the state into the scheme, which seals the deal with the private equity guys. From there it is just a churn as Musk and his buddies get their seed money out with interests as new investors demand to get in on the action. Since these projects take decades, the risk of it unraveling in the short term in minimal.

The best part of a scheme like this is he can get his seed money out early and still have equity in the new project. The investors and the government are on the hook and they will keep putting money into it no matter how many times a Space X rocket explodes or a Tesla bursts into flames. That’s not to say Musk is a con man like Lustig. The main difference is that Lustig was breaking the law, while Musk is well within the law. In fact, his innovation is to make the law his partner.

Musk is a modern incarnation of P.T. Barnum, pitching the attractions of the technocratic state via public-private partnerships. Barnum would find exotic acts to put inside his act, while Musk finds big technology projects. Instead of getting the public to buy a ticket to see the bearded lady or wolf boy, Musk gets the public to support the expenditure of public funds for his latest whiz bang idea. In the process, he and his associates get an exclusive investment opportunity and make millions from schemes that tend not to result in much of anything, other than hype.

I have always failed to understand why people single out Elon Musk for selling, of all things, hype. The man created a line of electric cars that totally outclass the competition, and compete extremely favorably with petroleum-fueled cars, and, oh yeah, started the first successful car company since god-knows-when to do so. The man single-handedly reinvigorated space as a thing. Think of it: since the Space Shuttle was retired half-a-decade ago, if America wanted to get into space, we called up Russia and politely asked them for a ride aboard one of their Soyuz rockets. And paid—handsomely, probably—for the privilege.… Read more »

Except that Tesla goes out of business without massive tax subsidies. He makes tax funded toys for rich people. I’m at a loss as to why that is a good thing. If he was pumping out cheap electric cars for the masses, sure, but he is not and he never intends to. I give him credit for pulling it off, but I think Barnum is under rated too.

Musk is a huslter. He’s not a crook anymore than Barnum was a crook. But, let’s not confuse the showman with the show.

I don’t think Musk caused the tax subsidies. Let us grant that Tesla is parasitic. Whose fault is that? Musk is just taking an opportunity that the state created. Of course, once you get a state demanding a business and a business that exists for the state, you do get into self-licking ice cream cone turf. So to some extent the charge of parasitism is Whether it is good: well, meh. I don’t see it as really good or bad. Wasting money is of course bad. But probably most of what the government does is much worse than wasting money… Read more »

Barnum did not create the market for freak shows. Tax eaters are not new. They have been around since the dawn of time. There are tens of thousands of small not-for-profits that do little more than apply for grants. Musk’s innovation is to take Barnum’s act and use it to exploit technocracy. Instead of selling monorails to Springfield and Shelbyville, he sells a big complicated concept to over educated technocrats in the managerial class. The lure is the futurism and the science! In other words, he sells the circus to the state, who then contracts with him to build the… Read more »

http://www.spacex.com/missions
Japanese Space Agency
Thales Alenia (Brit/Ital)
ORBCOMM – mobile telecomm
Several asian sat companies
I didn’t know NASA had taken over several good companies. Kudo’s to their managament

To some extent I agree he is less innovator than salesman, but fact checking is important

I wouldn’t go as far as dubbing SpaceX ”a solid business” but considering how lousy NASA was (the whole Shuttle program was a fiasco, mostly nonsensical PR missions, such as yes, the ill-fated Challenger one) perhaps the US space program is better spearheaded by him than anyone else. Not to mention there is no such animal as truly private enterprise space operations, and quite possibly (sorry, sci-fi fans) ever will be. I don’t hold the failures against SpaceX, it’s inherently high risk, just like flying was many years ago. It IS experimental, which means the odds of failure are high… Read more »

Acknowledging the “risky business” of space flight along with the astronomical bloat of the Agency that has turned “light & fast” into “heavy & slow”, the program accomplished a lot not to mention the side benefits generated from advances in science and product technology. Here is a simple summary of the Space Shuttle program: “Since 1981, NASA’s fleet of space shuttles have been roaring into orbit from the Kennedy Space Center. More than 130 times, these amazing machines have traveled to Earth orbit, deploying and repairing satellites, and doing experiments. Since 1998, shuttle missions have delivered the components and crews… Read more »

how musk operates seems almost ideal for advancing the state of the art in key technologies. yes he gets government money, but so do many others who never produce anything of value. sometimes a promising new technology needs a little help to reach critical mass, especially with all the regulatory hurdles in place now. as long as Musk keeps pushing the state of the art forward, I am for letting him have the money. he is definitely a huckster, but he is also producing tangible success. also keep in mind *all * of his foreign competition receive huge subsidies. compared… Read more »

You hit on Musk’s angle. He sells the future and who does not love the future? The Cock Bothers sell the past so they stink. Musk sells the future, so he is glorious. Both of them are tax eaters, but one is bold and brash, selling puppies and starbursts, so he is the winner.

Between the Apple’s Job’s/Wozniack type innovators and the Solyndra “Dindu Nuffin’s”, sits Elon. Granted as the front man, and I am not sure how much of the ideas are “his” versus those on his “team” but he is certainly willing to take credit. His ventures cover the range from SpaceX being the most successful, then Tesla, then his solar endeavors (of which I don’t really know much), but I think it is a bit early to call him a “National Treasure.” That is akin to giving Obama the Nobel Prize just for getting elected as the First Black President. An… Read more »

Because of this: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-20150531-story.html It’s not unique to Musk. Lockheed, Boeing, and other large military/industrial companies do the same thing. The difference is that Musk is an actual person, so he’s easier to “single out”. That being said, I have only limited issues with what Musk does. This is actually one of those things that the Government should be doing. Like interstate highways and developing space orbital infrastructure. But NOT like the ITER in France which is a government-run boondoggle. There are just some things that individuals and startups cannot accomplish, but which are a net good for society. The… Read more »

The difference between electric cars and flat screen TV’s is physics. The technology to make a high def TV was worked out before anyone started selling them. The first models cost a fortune because they had not worked out how to cheaply mass produce them, but that was mostly a matter of building market for them. We don’t know how to replace your gas tank with a quick charging battering that cost under a $1000. We have no idea how to roll out a new electric grid to recharge these cars in the backwoods of West Virginia. There are huge… Read more »

“For now”. The first HDTVs suffered not just from prices, but from both the lack of HD content and the lack of ability to get that content to people over copper telephone wires. We’ve not only solved the copper wire problem, we’ve solved the entire problem of wires period. In less than 10 years. I still laugh at all the coax and Ethernet cables strung throughout my house that is nearly 100% unused. Are there still places where these things aren’t fully available? Yes, and it’ll take another decade to get those poor West Virginans off of their dial up… Read more »

No, it’s not resolved in most of the country. It’s resolved in parts of the cities. I work for an ISP that provides coverage in a small regional area. We are in the process of putting in our own fiber optics but it’s only going in the bigger towns. Some areas are 5mbps max and there are areas we don’t service that are satellite only. There is money to try and upgrade services in these rural areas, but they don’t have the infrastructure to support high speed internet.

First of all, I said “most places”, and acknowledged there are a few areas remaining. Second of all, the actual data says you’re dead wrong. Third, we have SOLVED the problem of copper wires. We have:
– fiber optics
– cable/coax
– satellite
– wireless

The problem of getting broadband to people is solved. That some people can afford broadband and some cannot is not anybody’s actual problem.

Excuse me, but I actually work in the industry. How many dialup customers do you deal with? Century Link is no longer providing dsl in the Tygh Valley area because it’s not profitable. I live in an area in Vancouver WA, where I have two options. I may be able to get Wi-Max type service or Comcast may not be lying when they say I can get business class (but not residential). Or I can do something through cell, which won’t allow me to work from home. If you look at that map you posted, take another look at the… Read more »

I said, accurately, that we have solved the problem of low bandwidth copper wires which could not support HD content. I also said, accurately, that it’ll take another decade to get that capability to everyone in the USA – particularly very rural areas. There will always be small dead zones. I can’t get broadcast (antenna) TV channels at my house in Colorado because of all the 13,000 foot mountains around us. FiOS is only available in a few cities. I have a cheap ass 1.5Mbps DSL because I’m not going to sell my soul to Comcast. That doesn’t mean there… Read more »

I think the bigger issue is the physics. A car that has a 300 mile range and needs hours to refuel is useless as a car, no matter the price. The claims of charge time from Tesla are mostly bravo sierra, but even if they get to the three hour range, the charge time begins to grow as the battery is used. The quest for the super battery has another issue beyond the physics. That is, we have proven technology that is better. American is awash in natural gas. We have something like a 500 year supply, but in reality… Read more »

Your right we have loads and loads of gas and no shortage of oil but I believe that strategically we need electric cars. I feel strongly that it is a defense issue. I also believe that it’s a freedom issue. If you have solar and an electric car it takes power away from the State.

Personally I would rather cars be hybrids but for practical purposes most people only need to charge at night and most people rarely take long trips over 300 miles.

THe physics are against natural gas as a fuel source also. Natural gas cars have about half to a third the range of gasoline-powered cars. I had one. It was a huge pain to constantly find places to fill it. If gasoline didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it. It is very energy dense due to the numerous chemical bonds in its molecule and the energy is easily converted to power in the ICE. Batteries may be great at producing power but their energy density is poor and hasn’t improved much in 20 years. They are also toxic and prone… Read more »

The difference is we can fairly easily built out the refill stations. There’s no need for a great discovery or a miracle. Regardless, we can make gasoline from natural gas as economical rates so it is a moot point anyway. Our IC engines are super clean now and super reliable.

No matter how you slice it, electric cars a solution in search of a problem.

Why is it that people seem to think that an “electric” vehicle will free them from the clutches of petroleum? Where will the electricity be generated from? Obama killed coal but maybe that will make a comeback now. Hydro and solar are good while others are, eh! Zman is right. How does a lower cost per charge but having to wait 40 minutes (or longer) for that charge translate into productivity? The costs to “fundamentally transform” the fuel infrastructure to electric is cost prohibitive and you still don’t address the “emissions” problem as the number of vehicles continues to grow.

I don’t think everybody thinks that. As the technology improves, they’ll buy them for the same reason they bought an iphone: its faster, its easier (bye bye gas station trip), its clean and ultra quiet, it looks pretty cool, and it solves a “multiple device” problem (in this case, the idea of a “gas station”). 200-300 mile range? NO PROBLEM. The vast majority of people drive their cars to work and back and stay within 10 miles of home for 90% of their travel. And chances are, places like shopping centers at malls will start to incorporate charging stations. You… Read more »

“Electric cars are a solution in search of a problem.” Isn’t that basically the theme of all of modern, Western society? 99% of the crap people consume solves a problem they didn’t even know they had. Hell, I saw a TV commercial the other day for a washing machine with a built in sink. WTF? The camera on your smart phone is about 100x more capable than you’re ever likely to need. Curved televisions. 20′ long Super Duty pickups that people use to drive to work on urban streets. Satellite TV (which has declined with the massive/cheap/nationwide availability of broadband…despite… Read more »

That’s one of the main reasons why we’re unlikely to find a lot of “intelligent life” in the universe. Without a few global mass extinctions, we’d have no petroleum products, and human civilization would have topped out roughly at the level of 18th century Great Britain. Scientists get all wet about the idea of liquid water, but really it’s fossil fuels that enable advanced societies.

Unless we come across an entire civilization that evolved on a methane-planet, in which case we probably wouldn’t even notice each other.

It’s going to be interesting in a few years when that those Tesla battery packs finally start dying – as in no longer able to take or hold a charge. I can only speculate, but I suspect the battery pack alone is $20-$30k. I doubt many Tesla owners are going to be interested in ponying up that much to replace that – assuming they are able to find someone who even can do the job. https://infogalactic.com/info/General_Motors_EV1 was the Tesla of 20 years ago, also flashy, also zippy, but used a conventional lead-acid ”golf cart” battery pack – with about a… Read more »

The plasma/TV cost problem was fixed through the standard supply and demand market system. The more people that bought them, the more companies that built them, and the cheaper they got. My iPhone 5 battery died last year. That used to mean you were done, and had to get a new $400 phone. Instead, I got a new battery from Batteries Plus for $19.99, a $5 kit to help me pry the cover off, and got another year out of the phone. None of your arguments are currently incorrect. They will become incorrect over time as is often the case… Read more »

Musk is a marketing genius and somewhat of an innovator. His idea of marketing the Tesla to CEOs, VPs, and wannabes was good. He knows the Silicon Valley striver well. GM never really marketed the EV1 and the people who had heard of it were mostly middle-management types and below so it never became sexy or associated with status.

Electric cars are a 100 year-old concept and they still haven’t taken off for reasons of chemistry and physics. I doubt Musk is ever going to make Tesla profitable. He really is a PT Barnum.

We’ll see, right? You know I’ve said for awhile now that cheap gas, natural and gasoline, is tied to some of the bigger tech revolutions coming in the country in the future (most notably, huge efficiency in logistics and delivery speeds). I didn’t say that those were going away. However, as prices come down, and as other manufacturers figure out how to take Tesla’s technologies and incorporate them into IC platforms, the batteries will continue to improve/shrink. 17 years ago, the best I could hope for with my phone was a few hours, and all it could to was dial… Read more »

People have once again fallen for the idea that unless we fund these “visionaries” some bad actor/s will. BS. We’ve got venture capitalists out there dying to give their money to anyone of genuine substance. Muck is nothing special.

Forget West Virginia, we’d need a new grid nationwide. LA already has rolling blackouts and brownouts in the summer when everyone is using their air conditioners. Imagine the strain on the grid with a couple million cars charging. Not only that, but we’d need new generation capability, too – and given that coal, oil, and nuke plants would all be tied up for decades in litigation, that ain’t happening any time soon.

LA has rolling blackouts because you fucksticks in CA can’t be bothered to build any goddamned power plants to, you know, GENERATE all that electricity to that you voraciously consume. So instead, you have to build hundreds of miles of transmission lines to get it from AZ and NV where people are sane enough to still build power plants. If the use of electric cars ramped up slowly, the grid would ramp up in unison to meet the demand, that’s straightforward engineering, no miracles need occur. Electric cars are NOT some panacea though. Out here in BFE, an electric car… Read more »

Oh Crap! Can you imagine a field of solar panels on every other block generating enough energy to store in batteries waiting to “refuel” electric vehicles for a long time? You think gas lines in the ’70’s were long! Each gas station would need a parking lot, restaurant and entertainment park as people wait for their “charge” and to be able to get back on the road.

Or maybe, they can have “pre-charged” packs that can be swapped out. A “Swap & Go” refuel model. Then the empties could be recharged “overnight.”

Actually, Tesla experimented with swap and go power packs in CA. e.g. somebody drives to SF from LA, gets their battery swapped out (it takes about 2 minutes), so they can just turn around and drive home. Result? Nobody used it. The supercharger technology is so good (80% charge in 40 min) that they could go to their meetings, and the car is charged up by the time they want to leave. When your car becomes like your cell phone, that’s a long-term sign that the IC engine only has 20-30 years left in it. Also, the big solar farms… Read more »

How many Teslas do you see on the road? I actually saw one yesterday and it’s the first one I’ve seen. How to you expect people to charge these cars, when we aren’t building new power plants to generate the electricity? And how do you deal with the issue of the batteries? Not many folks want to spend thousands of dollars to replace all the batteries in the car.

I saw a Tesla the other day. It was a dark, cold, wet day and it was doing 55 mph on a stretch where everyone else was doing 75, probably so he could conserve power to keep his lights, wipers, and defrosters on. I researched this the last time this came up and if memory serves me well, gasoline has 40 times the energy density of the best batteries. And while gas tanks do blow up, they don’t seem to do so with anything like the frequency of Li ion batteries. And while I concede that Hokoda’s argument has merit,… Read more »

It’ll take time, but the “iPhone” nature of the Tesla and similar vehicles will make them broadly appealing. If we tried to put 1,000,000 of those suckers on the power grid next month, it wouldn’t work. But over a decade or two the infrastructure will meet the need. A lot of new construction today (homes) is done with things like fiber and wireless in mind (just like my current house has a lot of late 90’s IT infrastructure built into it…eithernet the main example). IC vehicles aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. But Tesla is ramping up to put 1/2 million… Read more »

The charging issue is a non-issue. Most all the time people charge in the evening. We don’t need any new plants. Actually the large load differences during the day require turning on extra generators during the day. More costly than base load generators. With more charging at night it would even out the load lowering electricity prices.

Charging is a non-issue until you want to drive from Boston to Baltimore or LA to San Fran.

I’m not convinced that you would not need more generating capacity. Utilities are always taking generators and boilers off line for maintenance. If you run the existing ones all day, you still need to build more capacity to acount for increased wear and tear and increased maintenance requirements.

True, however, I was booking a trip to Orlando this summer and the hotel we’re looking at advertises its supercharger charging stations on the hotel property. If you’re driving from LA to San Fran, you’re probably going to stop for coffee and a sandwich along the way. Plenty of time to recharge the car and use the free wifi at the attached restaurant.

Where does this idea that most people don’t drive 200-300 miles per day? Even if the average number says that is true, the others that do make that kind of trip daily will have a huge hit in delays and other productivity costs waiting for charge time. Yes, the charging issue is a non-issue. We have consensus. It is fact.

75% (ish) of drivers commute less than 50 miles (round trip) each day. You’re going to see more and more companies with charging stations in their parking garages (as the kinds of people who will buy EVs likely are upper middle class and higher types). Charging is a non issue for a huge percentage of people’s annual mileage.

I agree with you King George and Leonard. The tax breaks are because we as a society think that these type technologies are good for the country. They had these before Musk got into it. I think they are a bargain for Defense compared to $1 trillion for the F35. (I must say I don’t believe all the tech in the E35 is a loser. The electronics seem to be very advanced. It’s the idea of making one plane do a bunch of stuff that screws the whole plane up.) Let’s not even talk about how Boeing is ripping us… Read more »

Yeah, right! All thanks to his good buddy Barry. He practically kills the US auto industry while wasting resources (firing CEO’s, bailouts and Cash-4-Clunkers), transforms NASA into some Muslim “who knows what” while killing space exploration, and sends billions of tax payer dollars to failed “green” energy projects. The fact that Elon could acquire technologies and designs on the cheap, (he’s a marketing shyster and I’m sure he didn’t design all that SpaceX stuff with his own research and money; the taxpayers paid for most of it via NASA). You think he is great, go ahead, invest your own money… Read more »

Always thought it was telling; while progs passionately hate corporate welfare, when it comes to Top Welfare Queen Musk, suddenly they discover a hero. Feeding from the public tax trough is okay, so long as you shit out shiny eco-toys priced for the 1%. Progs love the rich and the poor, but detest the tax-paying middle. They must be made to pay for exploding rockets and rich men’s virtue-signaling status rides.

The base model Teslas is $71K before taxes and the $10K bill for fitting the charging station in the house. I did the research on it and that’s what it costs around here, all in. What you get for your $80K is a car you can use on weekends, as it has a 200 mile range. Maybe you take it to work if you have a short commute and no risk of getting stuck in traffic. Now, that car does come with a tax break so you get some money back. It also comes with tax subsidies to Tesla for… Read more »

Here in California you get to drive the Tesla in the car pool lane with one occupant. That is a huge selling point because people crave bragging rights. Talking about it means you have gamed the system (so you are obviously smart and clever), you are saving the environment from big oil (virtue points), and you are rich enough to afford a car that goes, all in, for almost six figures. A bragging trifecta! There is a dealership nearby, and lots of Teslas are on the road in my area. I see them getting picked up by the side of… Read more »

Tesla Model 3 anticipated base price is $35K before the government tax break for consumers. I can’t stand tax credits, but they do exist, and people will use them, and it’ll cover the cost of getting the supercharger installed at home.

Z Man; I don’t get the Eiffel Tower Con. Ordinarily, the mark (M Poisson) is enticed by the lure of easy money at somebody else’s expense, sometimes even (supposedly) the con artist’s (Lustig). That’s why it’s hard to cheat an honest man: He doesn’t think that way. So, how was M Poisson going to turn owning the Eiffel Tower into easy money_? Admissions_? Scrap doesn’t pay much and the demolition would have been dangerous and expensive. Surely Poisson would know this. The Brooklyn Bridge Con’s connection between owning the bridge and easy money is obvious: I.e. charge tolls on a… Read more »

After the war, scrap iron had value. It always has value, but the massive rebuilding required after the war put a premium on it. Lustic was offering access to cheap steel. What made it work was the audaciousness of it. You don’t get more audacious than claiming you will build electric sports cars for the masses or privatize the space business. It’s why SpaxeX is now talking about Mars. What’s more audacious than that?

There was also the original plan that the Eiffel Tower was to be a temporary installation. There was likely still a rational assumption, at the time, that keeping the thing up forever was not going to be. The con played off of that.

Musk is obviously brilliant, and next to him Lustig would feel justified in his last official job description, “salesman apprentice”. Just some of the ways that stand out for me: – Appropriated the name of a true genius, Nikola Tesla, to gain credibility by association; – Has the physiognomy and the body language of a TV-evangelist; – Uses enormous, emotionally moving applications for his projects that capture public imagination the same way high-profile stock IPOs do (regardless of their company viability); – Masterfully plays on people’s motivations: the government employees involved in his projects will never scrap them as a… Read more »

“…he is living life all the while keeping others, who believe that life is a series of problems to be solved, believing that is is actually solving their problems…” The guy works like 100 hours a week. After selling paypal he could have sat on his ass for life but he bet most all the money he had on solar power for houses, electric cars and rocket ships. You people have some serious mental issues with Musk that I don’t understand. I don’t get the Mars thing but I’m very pro space program and he’s moving it along at wide… Read more »

“The guy works like 100 hours a week.” We’ve pretty much established that this guy is a first-class parasite. So you’re arguing that hard-working parasites aren’t really parasites? Funny logic indeed. This is the same logic that Wall Street bankers love to apply to themselves to justify their gigantic compensation. “Look how unbelievably hard we work, look how hard we compete with each other!” they never complete the sentence, which goes, “…in order to loot the productive part of the economy as thoroughly as we possibly can.”

Your response is completely disingenuous and a huge huckster propped up straw man. You know that what I was establishing was that the criticism of him ““…he is living life..” was foolish. As he “had the life” already. He was already a multi, multi-millionaire. He had to do nothing. He bet multi-millions of dollars on these businesses. NASA didn’t give him a dime until he was successfully launching rockets. He only got solar and electric car money when he sold them. Not before. “…So you’re arguing that hard-working parasites aren’t really parasites?…” You know that that’s another straw man as… Read more »

Part of it too is he offers different things to different people. Tesla does nothing for me, solarcity too. Spacex and his lure of going to mars does it for me though and if the other two parts fall off down goes spacex. I am kind of forced to support all the myriad parts.

This goes a little bit along with the talk about narcissists and sociopaths the other day. I stumbled across a text I made to someone that had this in it:https://voxday.blogspot.com/2016/08/mailvox-how-can-you-tell.html?=1 Less pertinent to today, but I thought worth posting. I, too think Musk is a bit of a grifter, but a very talented one who may be filling a void that needed to be filled by someone. If that void was going to be filled, better him than T. Boone Pickens, who wanted to cover the face of the country with windmills and transmission centers in a public-private partnership that… Read more »

You’re not the only one saying Musk is a (albeit within the law) con artist: http://ericpetersautos.com/2017/01/28/elons-carbon-con-elections-consequences-part-deux/
With Tesla cars his main gambit is pushing ”carbon credits” (on Internal combustion cars) that can be ”offset” with his cars, particularly effective in CA – not to mention the subsidies on every vehicle he sells. The linked article also points out the shell game he’s playing to keep his ‘solar city’ project out of bankruptcy. Will Trump play along or not? I’m not confident he won’t.

Musk is probably part of the James Baker, who made an appearance today pushing a ‘carbon tax’ scheme, and Al Gore Carbon Tax Scam. These people need to be jailed for outright lies, collusion and false advertising. Grifter is the correct description.

Reminds me of the confidence game being run in the venture capital markets right now. Suddenly everybody is a “corporate VC”. And getting sold B and C rounds that let the smart guys get their money off the table, lock a profit and likely have all the good liquidation rights buried in their agreements. Won’t end well.

Elon just took advantage of the much bigger con, that being the global warming hoax. When he saw how completely the politicians and their handmaidens, the money men, had been seduced by Algore, he stepped in to “save” Tesla thereby getting a nice free ride on the scam.

Waiting for 50 years for someone to take a can opener to the great crony con called “The D”. There is a very rich and savory stew to be exposed; rust belt city where the greatest concentration of wealth vanished without a trace.

These rich idiots who virtual-signal with Teslas or Prius’s have all been sucked into the greatest con ever played on us: GlowBull Warming. They never have the intellectual courage to even ask where all the electricity comes from. Of course, the UN has glommed onto to this fraud and used it as a proxy as the best method of subjugating the masses initially with Agenda 21 and now Agenda 2020 on their stated path to a one-world government. Google those terms and read up. It’s some real scary shit. While you’re at it buy and read James Delingpole’s short book… Read more »

Given that civil servants and politicos are generally sluggish, low IQ, dunces any sensible con-man would target them first.

Besides, civil servants and politicos have very, very perverse incentives – the more tax dollars they are responsible for spending, the more they can rake-off, by way of a higher civil service rating, more salary, great expenses and travel, a bigger office and a zaftig new secretary with the big boobies.

You folks have some serious issues with Musk that I see as completely irrational. Look at just one program that he will save us an ass full of money. The Space Launch System that they haven’t so much as launched a basket of air with,”…SLS program has a projected development cost of $18 billion through 2017, with $10 billion for the SLS rocket, $6 billion for the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle and $2 billion for upgrades to the launch pad and other facilities at Kennedy Space Center…” So they’ve spent at least $18 billion and have launched…nothing. Musk is building… Read more »

I agree completely with you on the flywheel storage. They can last decades or longer. Lithium batteries were already there and working. I think flywheels can be built but it would take a LOT of research to make it competitive. If carbon fiber or fused silica comes down it cost it help tremendously and they seem to be. There’s a new strong fiber from trees or brush or any plant stem materiel stem call nano crystalline cellulose that really strong and estimated to get down to a dollar a pound or so. Going to take a lot more production to… Read more »

Explain how being paid for services rendered (or progress completed on large items still in construction) is a subsidy. When NASA has the Russians send up a payload, does it not pay them for this service? So what makes the same contractual relationship suddenly turn into a subsidy when the recipient of said payment is a US company? Your blind spot on this issue is the same as your blind spot on the automation/robots in MFG issue. You literally don’t have any idea how much you don’t know, so you assume that you know it all. The electric car and… Read more »

So far, SpaxeX has not done much of anything other than blow rockets up in space. I’m all for letting private firms take over the job of flinging stuff into space, but so far, SpaxeX has been terribly unreliable. Yet, they have been given close to $500 million to try and learn how to do it properly. By any reasonable measure, SpaceX is looking a lot like a boondoggle.

“…So far, SpaxeX has not done much of anything other than blow rockets up in space…”

That’s a flat out lie. They’ve launched several geo. orbit and several lower orbit satellites.

I agree with NunyaBusiness. We desperately need our own access to Space. We let the Japanese and Chinese do a lot of stuff for us. Supposedly saving money now it affecting our ability to build defense equipment. I guess you guys won’t be happy until all our industry is the absolute cheapest cost and most Americans hew wood and plant soybeans for the Asians.

Yet again, you’re talking out of your ass Z-man. It is not a character flaw to not know everything about everything, it IS a character flaw to repeatedly say shit that is demonstrably false just from sheer lack of effort (IE very obviously having done NO research on what SpaceX has and has not done). I get it, you’re skeptical of Musk, everyone should be, but you’ve gone way beyond skeptical into being openly dismissive of anything the guy has been near, to the point that you’re talking completely out of your ass. Instead of just assuming that they’re grifters… Read more »

Forgive me for being skeptical. We have been subjected to so much crony capitalism and corruption these past years, even if Musk is the “real deal” it is hard to get past the defense mechanisms people have, like I do. However, I do see the ideas he is involved with as innovative approaches to problems. Maybe what gets lost here is his having made his initial fortune on PayPal and not being in a mode like Tesla of being the poor inventor using his last pennies scrounging materials to put together a “mock-up” for investors. Instead he has a bankroll,… Read more »

Tesla and the solar deals might very well be as you say above, the chances and past experience with other companies in those fields say they likely are. However, SpaceX is different, in that instead of founding, getting funding, and then cashing his initial investment out, Musk has continued to add money into SpaceX. His current position is north of $100million right now, which is something like 25% of the entire nut so far. People keep talking about that $500million from NASA, but that’s the value of a contract, not a lump sum payment that they just got dumped in… Read more »

Amazing how many people here are making excuses for a con artist like Musk. Who cares that he’s selling snake oil, rockets are cool!! Teslas look cool and go fast!!! Besides it’s just gubmint money, everyone knows that just drops out of the sky like manna from Heaven, so nobody loses, plus did I mention, rockets!!!

You people are nuts. Whose making excuses. We need a Space program. It’s absolutely necessary for the defense of the nation. Boeing and Lockheed have been given 10’s of billions for new rockets and haven’t launched a damn thing. The only thing they do launch they charge us an arm and a leg for stuff we developed. Musk is doing the same thing at orders of magnitude cheaper. I don’t see any of you making logical arguments based on the needs of the country. If you believe that we should stop all of our space program then I could see… Read more »